Editorial Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts in which poets offer a reading of a favorite poem by a poet friend. Kathy Fagan is the author of four books of poetry: Lip, The Charm, MOVING & ST RAGE, and The Raft. She teaches at the Ohio State University. Michael David Madonick is the author of two books of poetry: Waking the Deaf Dog and the forthcoming Bulrushes. He teaches at the University of Illinois and is the poetry editor at Ninth Letter.

       1.

WHALE
by Michael David Madonick

Even in the Midwest, the snow scarves
whipped by wind across the interstate,

miles of big sky and glare and the ribbed
glitter of silos, birds pushing like little

rowers against the tide, long grass brought
to its knees, the lines of highway insisting

on some conclusion or another. There are
no shells that I can see, though I hear,

in the dull movement of my silly car
down the road, that same kind

of reverberation, a deep hollowness, a
moaning that asks to be filled, the asphalt,

a slim encumbrance between
the here and there, where the whale, lurking

on the other side of the earth, hears my
rendering tires, the nervousness

of my grip to the wheel – sounds, then
breaches, comes up a few times for air

in that snow-covered soybean field, the golf course,
the Shell Station, the ostrich farm, or in my rearview

mirror until it eyes what it really wants, the food
that it rises for and takes to the deep and makes us part of –

Jesus, water, this hamster at the wheel.

      2.

Jonah and the Wheel: on Michael David Madonick’s “Whale”
by Kathy Fagan

I missed this poem when it appeared first in Mid-American Review. I didn’t read it until Mike sent me his new manuscript, Bulrushes, to blurb (forthcoming from The Backwaters Press). What happens to us when we enter a poem as fully as I entered this one remains, for me, one of the most singularly gratifying experiences in life. Dickinson said it was like having the top of her head taken off; for me it’s like having my head put back on. As if all of my senses and wits work more efficiently, more powerfully than they ever have. I don’t have to explain this, right? It’s like going somewhere else, only the opposite (“I have it in me so much nearer home…”). So here I am quoting Dickinson and Frost out of context—but a great poem does hark back to its ancestors and out toward poems to come, I think. Which is why it’s appropriate that this poem of Mike’s ride the leviathan back of the Midwest. That it be written in two sentences, the first of which consists of a long list that actually resists being a sentence at all. I love how the lines begin in pentameter and then dive at the end of that first non-sentence, and how they slowly fill to capacity again as the “emergence” in the poem occurs. Madonick offers pretty images for those of us still too shy to cross the poem’s threshold: the snow “scarves” and the birds pushing like “rowers.” These touches would be merely decorative at best, show-boatish at worst, if it weren’t for the elegantly bizarre suggestion of the ocean shell that follows. The way that Madonick subtly foreshadows the connection between whale and speaker when describing the sound his car makes as a “hollowness, a/ moaning that asks to be filled….” The hunger of travel, and the liminal highway, “a slim encumbrance,” separating this world from the next. How delicious that he follow these more difficult lines with the reward of “rendering tires” and all that that evokes: tracks, couplets, payment, distillation. How wonderful also the surprising Midwestern interstate ordinariness of field, golf course, Shell Station, and ostrich farm. What do whales really want, Mike seems to ask at the end of this poem. And the answer is what it always is: if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Bulrushes, by the way, is filled with poems about creatures real and mythical, all as intricately crafted and How’d-The-Poet-Do-That gorgeous as this one is.

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